Supermarkets should test pork and chicken and other meats for
cross-contamination in the wake of the horsemeat scandal, the food standards
regulator has said.

Catherine Brown, chief executive of the Food Standards Agency, said shoppers would expect retailers to test all their meat products for cross-contamination by other meat in the wake of the horsemeat scandal.

The news came as the supermarket chain Tesco admitted it had been selling frozen spaghetti Bolognese readymeals which were between 60 per cent and 100 cent horsemeat.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Miss Brown said retailers were currently focusing on ‘comminuted’ beef – “the stuff where meat is ground up to the point that it is not readily recognisable”.

But once the horsemeat scandal was over, other meats like pork and chicken would have to be tested too for cross-contamination. She said: “It is not lost on retailers that they need to test significantly across this product range, across wider meat-based product ranges.”

The findings had to be made public to consumers. She said: “It is no good just knowing they are doing it – they need to make it available to us.

“At the moment we are getting them first to focus on ‘comminuted’ beef, meat balls, spaghetti, beef burgers – but there is a real sense from industry that they are thinking about the wider food chain.”

There have been reports of chicken being secretly injected with waste from the beef and pork production process to inflate chicken breasts to fetch a higher price. The findings are particularly sensitive because Muslims, Jews and Hindus are forbidden from eating either pork or beef.

Supermarkets will publish testing results of their beef products on Friday this week – however, this will not be an end to the uncertainty.

Miss Brown disclosed that the number of product lines which had to be checked meant that only “the first set of results” - possibly as few as a quarter of the total - can be published on Friday.

Retailers have now been told that they have to inform the FSA if they found “the slightest indication” of cross-contaminated meat. In future they could be required to publish food testing figures every three months.

The FSA has ordered tests on Findus beef lasagne, to find out whether there are traces of phenylbutazone or “bute”, an anti-inflammatory painkiller used on horses.

Miss Brown appeared to add to the confusion by insisting that she would not eat a Findus lasagne, while also suggesting that eating bute could be harmless.

Asked if she would eat a ready meal lasagne, she replied: “I wouldn’t eat Findus products that we are awaiting the Bute tests on – but anything else is fine to eat.”

She added that even eating bute would not be “a huge cause for concern”, because not enough testing had been carried out on safe levels.

She said: “If you were to discover you had eaten Bute there would not be cause to be hugely concerned. However we are absolutely clear that we don’t want to be putting it regularly into the food chain.”

Miss Brown rejected calls to ban EU imports as “disproportionate” because “at the moment there is no suggestion this is a safety issue”.

Tesco reported that 23 tests on its frozen Everyday Value Spaghetti Bolognese, which it had withdrawn after the Findus scare, had uncovered three portions containing more than 60 per cent horsemeat. There was no trace of bute.

Downing Street stepped in to knock back claims made by Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, that eating horse meat could be harmful to human health.

Mr Paterson, who has been criticised for his handling of the crisis, had suggested that tests on food products could reveal that substances in horse meat passed into the British food chain could prove “injurious to human health”.

However, the Prime Minister called Mr Paterson in to Downing Street on Monday morning and later his official spokesman insisted that there is “no evidence of a risk to human health”.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, said “there is nothing to suggest a safety risk to consumers who may have eaten the products”.

Speaking to MPs in the House of Commons on Monday night, Mr Paterson said the scandal was “completely unacceptable” and pledged to meet with other European Union ministers on February 25.

He said: "Consumers need to be confident that food is what it says on the label. It is outrageous that consumers have been buying products labelled beef, but which turn out to contain horsemeat. It is unacceptable that people have been deceived in this way.

"The prime responsibility for dealing with this lies with retailers and food producers who need to demonstrate that they have taken all necessary actions to ensure the integrity of the food chain in this country."

It emerged that the two abattoirs that supplied the horse meat had been identified by the Romanian government. The Government said the two plants were in Botosani, near the Moldovian border in the north east, and the central town of Brasov in Transylvania.

But ministers and abattoir owners said that a three-day investigation had “cleared” their name and they angrily denounced France for pointing the finger at them.

They said that they had supplied the horse meat that ended up on British supermarket shelves but that it had been correctly labelled when it left their country.

Romania exports around £8 million worth of horse meat a year. It costs on average 50 per cent less than beef and can be as much as six times cheaper.